Flavoring components are utilized in a wide variety of food and beverage products to impart, provide, modify, or enhance the flavor or taste to the product. Such components are often isolated or extracted from various natural materials. When these components are extracted from plants, the flavor and taste characteristics of such components can deteriorate or degrade over time, thus reducing the desirable taste, flavor, or sensory properties of products to which these components are added.
For example, coffee aroma is utilized in a wide variety of products, including instant coffee and ready to drink coffee beverages as well as coffee flavored foods such as ice cream, baking products, or candy. But coffee aroma is known to be very unstable. As coffee aroma degrades, it generates unpleasant and non-coffee-like notes that are undesirable. This degradation substantially reduces the perceived quality of the product. A particular problem is in the storage life of coffee concentrates.
For this reason, special attention must be paid to the storage of flavoring components such as coffee aroma. It has been found that the shelf life of a coffee product can be substantially improved by holding or retaining the coffee aroma separately from the from the coffee solids during storage and then combining these components immediately prior to the preparation of the beverage for consumption. This is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,319,537. Although this separate storage technique reduces the amount of degradation of the coffee aroma during storage, some degradation still occurs and the final combined product may yet contain non-coffee flavors that detract from the perception of quality in the final product.
The prior art recognizes that various flavor protective agents can be added to food or beverage products in order to preserve, maintain, or improve the flavor characteristics of such products over time. It is well known in the art that sulfites can be added to beverages such as beer or wine to preserve the flavor of such beverages. Generally, sulfites act as antioxidants to prevent deterioration of the flavor. For example, sulfites can react with oxygen to prevent deterioration of the flavor of the product due to oxidation of the flavoring component.
Also, Japanese patent application 08/196212 discloses the addition of a sulfite to a coffee beverage when liquid is added to reconstitute the beverage. This is not very effective as the sulfite simply dissolves in the beverage without significantly enhancing or preserving the aroma because the sulfite is added into the whole food matrix and is integrated therein.
Instead of adding the sulfites directly to food products, U.S. Pat. No. 4,536,409 discloses that sulfites may be incorporated into the packaging to prevent absorption of oxygen into the packaged food. Again, oxidation of the flavor component is reduced so that the desired flavor of the food is retained for a longer period of time.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,540,889 discloses that methyl mercaptan can be added to an aqueous extract of soluble coffee solids prior to drying the extract to a stable moisture content for improving the flavor of this extract when it is reconstituted as a coffee beverage.
Despite these disclosures, there still remains a need for stabilization of volatile flavoring components in order to preserve their ability to impart the desired flavor, taste, and other sensory characteristics to foods to which they are added. The present invention now provides a number of practical solutions that satisfy this need.